Hacker News Reader

Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

I remember a few years ago when there was some research group that was able to take a picture of a black hole. It involved lots of complicated interpretation of data.

As an extra sanity check, they had two teams working in isolation interpreting this data and constructing the image. If the end result was more or less the same, it’s a good check that it was correct.

So yes, it’s absolutely a valid strategy.

View on HN

Did the teams know that there was another team working on the same thing? I wonder how that affects working of both teams... On the other hand, not telling the teams would erode the trust that the teams have in management.

There were four teams actually. They knew but couldn't talk to each other. There's a documentary about it. I highly suggest watching it, it also features late Stephen Hawking et al. working on black hole soft hair. Documentary is called Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, it's on pretty much all streaming platforms.

Yep! I've done eng "bake-offs" as well, where a few folks / teams work on a problem in isolation then we compare and contrast after. Good fun!

Not good fun when it's done in secret. That happened to me, and I was gaslit when I discovered the competing git repo.

Not saying that's what happened here, but too many people are defending this horrid concept of secretly making half your workers do a bunch of work only to see the boulder roll right back down the hill.

Yeah, doing it in secrecy is a recipe for Bad Things. I worked at a startup that completely died because of it.

Yeah that sounds toxic, this was done with everyones knowledge

Maybe they needed two teams to independently try to decode an old tape of random numbers from a radio space telescope that turned out to be an extraterrestrial transmission, like a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation or something. Happens all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com